


death i think is no parenthesis, Kirk/McCoy/Spock, PG-13

by blcwriter



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Originally Posted on LiveJournal, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, TOS series references, Tarsus IV, poetry references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-28
Updated: 2015-06-28
Packaged: 2018-04-06 13:26:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4223400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blcwriter/pseuds/blcwriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Here is a road map to the dense slush of references besides the cummings to start.</p><p>Keats' <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/101/625.html">"Ode on a Grecian Urn"</a> ('Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'),</p><p>Page 213 of Sappho's "If Not, Winter", a collection of her poetry fragments</p><p>William Carlos Williams' "<a href="http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15535">This is Just to Say</a>", the plums reference Jim makes at the end.</p></blockquote>





	death i think is no parenthesis, Kirk/McCoy/Spock, PG-13

Another battle/orgy prompt post for Team McSpirk for STXI Ship Wars on LJ.  IDEK know how e.e. cummings turned into a backhanded homage to Keats and Sappho’s fragmented poems. It was what was caught my eye on my poetry shelves that afternoon.  Warnings for elliptical references to torture, old TOS episodes, Tarsus and of course, broken!Jim.

-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-

_since feeling is first_  
who pays any attention  
to the syntax of things  
will never wholly kiss you; 

_wholly to be a fool  
while Spring is in the world_

_my blood approves,_  
and kisses are a better fate  
than wisdom  
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry  
\-- the best gesture of my brain is less than  
your eyelids’ flutter which says 

_we are for each other: then_  
laugh, leaning back in my arms  
for life’s not a paragraph  
And death i think is no parenthesis  
  
e.e. cummings

-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-

Jim’s disregard for order and grammar in his informal papers is notorious, at least aboard _Enterprise_. For someone so well-spoken in the final regard, the captain’s personal logs are an elliptical ramble, his draft notes to his working professional files are hardly much better. Leonard and Spock have found themselves spending hours by his bedside untangling those memos provided by Jim’s Yeoman Rand.

“I … they’re due and … he’s never late when he gives them to me and I thought I could work on them for a bit … I can’t make heads or tails … I just can’t,” she says, fleeing, her normal composure as broken as the still, thin form of their captain.

“I’m never going to make sense of all of this jumble,” Leonard mutters under his breath as he highlighted another phrase with his stylus and inserts it into a “dump document” as he has come to call the extraneous file where he inserts those fragments of thoughts that seemed to have nothing to do with those matters at hand. Spock has thought the idea logical and has begun doing the same, each fragment assigned its own line. The variety of items is breathtaking—he recognizes as he works portions of math postulates currently working their way through the theoretical journals as well as a number of linguistic declensions, but the fragmentary thoughts and half-sentences are also maddening to Spock, whose own drafts are such that any subordinate could turn them into a final product with ease.

He suppresses the thought that his work does not encompass the breadth that Jim’s does. Were Jim to start a new file every time he had a new thought, he would use up Enterprise’s memory banks very quickly.

Painstakingly slowly through the depths of gamma and delta shift over the course of a week, each budget document or crewman review begins to take shape. The two waking men of the triad share suppositions over Jim’s state of mind as he’d drafted each report and what else he might do to come to a decision, at times arguing as vociferously over what Jim would think, do or say as if the man were awake and could soothe their argument with his usual smirk, wink or joke. Spock co-signs each finished report and beams them to Yeoman Rand as they finish—Jim, though, remains silent and still.

It has been nearly two weeks since the empath Gem had refused to take on Jim’s pain during his tortures.

 _Too much there before they began_ was the feeling that came through when Spock touched her, after the Vians released them, angry and thwarted after days of what Spock would call inhuman noises-- except they could only be Jim’s. She had run away—cringed—from Leonard’s understandable furor, but the facts then—as now, were simple and not.

The Vians had meant to test Gem and her people—Spock, Leonard and Jim were mere tools, “wrong place at the wrong fuckin’ time,” as Leonard so aptly said—but Jim had not been a factor the Vians had counted upon. He had somehow circumvented the controls on the separate cells containing Leonard and Spock so the Vians could not reach them, use them for their experiment to determine whether Gem’s people had learned true empathy, the willingness to expend themselves for their friends.

They had not—and Jim survived, if that was what breathing was. It was survival, if that was what was meant by a body Leonard could guide after that first week to eat, bathe, dress itself at specific suggestion—but there was no eye contact, no recognition in the beloved blue eyes.

Attempts to embrace are not rebuffed. Kisses on hair growing longer than Jim would normally tolerate—“Bones, stop playing with it, it gets annoying when it’s that long,” he had said on past shore leaves—are not drawn away from—but there is no reciprocation. Any touch is merely forborne, not something that should have been the case given the injuries Spock had ripped from the mind of the lead Vian before he and Leonard beamed back to the ship, then interdicted the planet.

It doesn’t stop either of them from holding his hand in the night when he sleeps, his hand passive and slack, or pulling him into their arms as he lolls, boneless and undreaming when Spock sends tendrils into Jim’s sleeping brain.

The things that made up the essence of Jim were simply not there. All Spock’s attempts to meld with that bright whirling mind, the things which made him dizzy and drunk in ways no humble intoxicant could—all his attempts to reach out ran not into a door like he had encountered in other humans’ hurt minds, but some whitened, hard, slippery substance.

“It is like—fine fired china,” he says after his fifth failed attempt, struggling for words as he strives to explain to Leonard why he had no success.

Leonard, scrolling through his “dump document,” looks at the pages of lines. There are disconnected snippets of maths, apparent quotes from stories and poems, chemical formulae, currency rates and language translations, the myriad bits of a ‘Fleet captain’s business intermixed with Jim’s work. It has all been left for Spock and Leonard had to parse. “Yeah. And this is Jim’s junk drawer, full of all of the smashed handles and tarnished old silver.”

-/-/-/-/-/-/-

Leonard was the one who had to finally do it. Spock just outright refused, all his damned logic freezing up in the face of the fact that Jim just was not getting better and for all that he ate, it wasn’t any more than a bird.

He’d tried to put the feeding tube into Jim’s arm and that—that had got a reaction, the kid freaking out, his _nonononononononono_ not a shriek or a whimper or yell, just Jim huddled back in a corner and looking at his two lovers like he’d never seen them before in his life. There was nothing but fear in his eyes as he curled in on himself and repeated _no_ in a near-inaudible monotone that sounded like rocks tumbling over themselves. He’d fallen asleep in the corner, everyone too afraid to try to get him to move.

There were few clues in Jim’s quarters—he had no holocubes of his family and though Leonard’d reached out not long after they’d gotten back, Winona’d been frank.

“I’m sorry, Dr. McCoy,” she’d said, face graven and grey at the news. “Jimmy left home before he was twelve, ran away while my brother Frank was taking care of the farm and I was off on a mission. I literally haven’t heard from him since. I tried a few times when he was at the Academy, saw him once at the service they had for the _Kelvin_ when you all were home right after _Narada_ , but he wants nothing to do with me.” She had paused, then tightened her lips, an expression Leonard knew well.

“Jim’s always guarded his secrets. If he hasn’t shared some with you, it’s not my place to tell.” Before he could shout that this was her damned son’s _life_ on the line, she’d disconnected the comm.

So now Jim was slowly wasting away and he had no damned idea how to unlock the past, figure out what key would do it. There were hundreds of books, histories and volumes of poems, old sailing models Pike had passed on, antique fragments of plates, some ceremonial swords Jim had collected on various planets. There were some puzzles in various stages on some of the tables, but Jim never finished—he got about half or two-thirds of the way, then lost interest and moved on to the next.

Well, Spock might not want to face logic, but for all his disorganization Jim was a practical bastard and if he was going to take care of the people who’d tried to do what they could for him in his life, there was one place to find it.

He spoke aloud, facing away from the bed that stood empty—their bed, when they were three. Most nights these days, he and Spock took turns sleeping next to Jim’s bed, not that Jim noticed.

“Computer, state if there is a record of the last will and testament of James Tiberius Kirk.”

“Affirmative.”

“Confirm who may access.”

“Commander Spock and Lieutenant Commander McCoy have password access along with James Tiberius Kirk.”

He swallowed and gathered his nerve. Jim wouldn’t make it that hard, he’d figure Leonard would be pretty upset and damned mad—like he was now—if he was dead.

“Computer, replay-- display—whatever—last will and testament of James Tiberius Kirk, authorization Leonard McCoy, password Bones.”

The computer screen inset into the wall blinked to life, lines of text scrolling. It stilled more quickly than Leonard thought to expect—the thing couldn’t be more than two pages. There was the usually legal mumbety-jumbo, but then came the part about how he wanted his things all bestowed.

Typical Jim, he’d written as if he was talking—there was nothing formal to his last bequests.

“Spock and Bones—as with everything else, I trust you will argue your way to the best distribution of things for everybody concerned. You always have, always will—it’s like those old cartoons about the devils and angels on the guy’s shoulders—Bones, explain it to Spock, I wish like hell I was there to see it—except you guys are both at the same time, the thing that keeps me both tethered to Earth and helps me to fly when sometimes I feel as transparent and fragile as glass. I love you both, you know that, but I’ll put it in writing here where you have to read it again. Use the money to take a vacation—you’ll both deserve it and need it, don’t work yourselves too hard out of guilt, I know you both will, so consider that my last order—but do me one favor.

The few potsherds, the urns and platters and stuff? To the extent she’s still living, I want you to send those to someone, along with a few of my books and a bit of the money. On my shelf, there’s a copy of Sappho, an antique copy of Keats, all the extant fragmented Greek tragedies, and a volume of other Greek poetic fragments.”

Jim went on to detail the name and address and Leonard’s mind read and catalogued the details, but one hand had already pulled down the volume of Sappho that Jim had referenced and flipped the thing open.

The first page he flipped to looked like what he’d disparagingly called “Jim’s junk drawer” as he tried to make sense of the shitloads of work Jim seemed to be able to do that had taken he and Spock forever to fix.

 _“Evening…/ you gather back …/ all that dazzling dawn has put asunder./ … you gather a lamb…/gather a kid/… gather a child to its mother.”_  
  
Further on down the page, another fragment appeared.

_”of all stars the most beautiful”_

On the opposite page was what looked to be Greek. Leonard had thought it was math when he’d been editing out Jim’s budgets this week, and hell, maybe some of it was.

It was impossible to tell if the fragments were part of the same poem. The words still were beautiful-- haunting.

Voice as cracked as the glazed terracotta sitting on Jim’s display shelf, Leonard spoke. “Uhura, it’s Leo. I need you to make a call, please.”

-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-

“Jimmy wouldn’t like me telling his secrets, but there’s a time and a place and if you three have been together a while,” the old woman answered when she finally spoke with Leonard and Spock.

“I assure you, madam, we have, nearly two years,” Spock replies, repressing the illogical urge to correct the eldress’ incorrect use of the infantile “Jimmy” instead of “Captain Kirk.” He might even accept Jim, but he knows from his mate’s most unsettled and inchoate nightmares—not that Jim’s sleep was anything except blank anymore—that Jimmy is a name that harbors no good memories for him.

“Well, then, that’s all to the good,” she says, eyeing Spock. “A Vulcan. How’d you two meet?”

Spock feels himself flushing and Leonard, in a burst of the raw honesty that exasperates even their Captain sometimes, says “he accused Jim of cheating back during school and threw Jim’s dead Daddy in to boot, then tried to strangle him on the bridge before he ditched him on the nearest ice planet.”

Before Spock can so much at hiss at his mate to maintain some kind of discretion, Leonard says, flushing red, “As for me, ma’am, I barfed all over Jim within two minutes of meeting him during the worst panic attack of my life, then spent three years at the Academy alternatingly getting in bar brawls with him or hauling him out, depending on what kind of mood I was in and how much I’d had to drink.”

She narrows her eyes.

“How’d you three get together?”

“We all got in a fight over who was going to get tortured when we got captured by Klingons.”

She nods, looking off over Leonard’s shoulder as she seems to consider. Spock follows her gaze. Her hawklike expression, as fierce as that of his family’s matriarch T’Pau, seems to soften, and Spock looks at the object of her interest—it is the most broken of the ancient Greek platters, black, white, terracotta, only-half glazed, the figures mostly obscured and the writing only part-legible. Attic Greek is not something Spock has expertise in—he can pick out the words “house” and “choose”—nothing else.

“That sounds like my Jim, still a fighter. I’ll send you a vidcube. You can piece it together from there.” She signs out before they can ask any questions.

-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-

He is thin—nearly skeletal, and while he’s wearing the form of a boy he has the burning eyes of a man, as old as Jim still sometime is after the worst away missions. He doesn’t speak, though he has a language of gestures in the shrugs of his shoulders and glares of his eyes. He juts his chin, shakes his head, crosses his arms, on occasion pushes away the people who try to steer him in the directions they want him to go—and he’s so very thin that Leonard—whose usual means of expressing his anger is ranting and raving—instead chokes.

He swallows urge to vomit up food in honor of this skeletal boy, his Jim— _their Jim_ —refusing all help, at least until a much younger version of the woman he and Spock spoke to not twelve hours ago appears and begins to meet with the children.

The label on the videocube says “Alternative Treatment Modalities, Non-Therapeutic Educational Regimens, Tarsus Survivors, 2246” and it’s a collection of vids of art gallery lectures and literature classes— the arts of the ancients, the real ones, the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Hindis, Romans and Greeks. They’re led by this woman, Hypatia Cade, the curator at the museum in Chicago that happens to be down the street from what Leonard knows is the best place on the planet, hell, maybe the quadrant, for treating PTSD.

The other kids are all as thin as Jim, but none look nearly as haunted. They all seem to be trying, at least, asking questions and doing what they can to talk about the poems and plays in translation, learn about all of the cultures from which sprang all the blood and glory the Terrans now stem.

Jim never speaks. He listens, it’s clear, and he watches the screens if a vid is displayed, watches, standing off to the side as the curator Cade walks them through the museum to point out the things recovered from all of the cultures that they’ve been discussing.

They’re standing in front of a table of potsherds, seemingly random.

“Broken,” Jim says, and his voice is final and flat. His voice is weak, dry and disused. He crosses his arms. His expression makes clear—Cade is wasting their time, there’s nothing to learn.  Interestingly, when Jim opens his mouth, all the other children become quiet and still, eyes trained on him much like the crew of _Enterprise_ do during battle positions.

There is much they do not know about Jim.

Cade doesn’t smile—she doesn’t shake her head either. Instead, she picks a few shards out at seeming random, flips them over, puts them together. It reveals a leg and part of a weapon, the black paint still stark after thousands of years under the glaze.

“They don’t all fit,” she says to Jim, “and we may not learn everything that can be known, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still try, or that there isn’t use to be made from the pieces we have.”

When she moves off with the rest of the group, Jim stays behind. He flips over every shard on the table—in ten minutes he’s assembled them all.

It’s the incomplete platter that sits in pride of place on Jim’s display shelves, that “damned ugly thing,” as Leonard’s called it dozens of times, to which Jim’s only said “It’s truth and thus beauty even if it isn’t an urn, so suck it up, Bones.”

Spock has it under his arm and is running to Sickbay before Leonard can even finish the thought.

-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-

Leonard reaches Spock as he waits outside the door to the Sickbay.

“It would be logical to isolate Jim in his own room should he react adversely.”

“You’re gonna fucking break what's maybe a priceless antique that he hand-pieced together, I’d say it’d be logical to clear the damned room.”

Leonard dismisses most of the staff except for Chapel and Geoffrey M’Benga while Spock ushers Jim into the small room they’ve been using for sleeping, Spock and Leonard taking shifts while the other attends to his regular duties, the platter under his arm. At first, Jim seems not to notice the platter, retreating instead to sit at the table and fold his hands neatly in his lap, quiet, composed. There’s an apple, some lettuce, some carrots—Jim has proven only willing to eat raw foods since his regression.

Given the Tarsus information, this is no longer surprising.

“Why didn’t you ever pick up on that … _that_ in his head?” Leonard asks, voice angry and harsh. He nonetheless speaks his override code, locking the door.

Spock turned his focus to Leonard—turned his focus _on_ Leonard when both had been so attentive to Jim these few weeks—took his hand and opened his shields and let him feel what he felt when he was usually inside Jim’s mind.

“Rollercoasters and physics and sunshine and of course fucking Shakespeare,” he muttered, pulling slightly out of the meld.

“We three all seek our privacy when we are disturbed. I have never pressed Jim, much as he does not for you or I. Our congress and concomitant sensory telepathic connection does not afford such depth. ”

Leonard nods sharp agreement. “He never mentioned…”

From their contact, he can tell Leonard is angry—seething with anger and feeling betrayed that Jim _didn’t tell me, didn’t trust me with this, didn’t he think I could help him, it’s not like I don’t know what it’s like to lose family and friends, Spock too, godfuckingdamnit, why the hell didn’t he just tell us, the secretive little sonofabitch, doesn’t he know that we love him?_ , and Spock comprehends all this anger.

Regardless, however.

“Recall the words of Miss Cade, Leonard,” he says, running his fingers on his mate’s palm, more a self-soothing gesture than anything else since Leonard lacks the extra receptors to feel the erogenous pleasure a Vulcan would feel.

“We may not learn everything that can be known, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still try, or that there isn’t use to be made from the pieces we have.”

Jim makes a small gasp as Spock finishes speaking and they both turn around—their mate’s ‘Fleet entrance exams contain indications that he has not just a photographic memory but an encyclopedic one, capable of remembering any speech given or any words sung. Add to that Jim’s tactical mind, his ability to think dozens of steps ahead of anyone else—it is no wonder he never finishes the modern-day jigsaw puzzles he has when he has all the pieces. Halfway through, Jim’s looked at the unfitted bits on the board and seen how it ends.

Together, fingers in contact, Spock and Leonard hurl the platter onto the floor.

-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-

They’re back in his quarters

quarters are home because that’s where his hearts are, two green and one red beating on either side of Jim’s body under the blankets next to his skin no clothing between them nothing between them at least not most of this bit of broken bit anymore

and they’re all in his bed and Bones is playing with his damned hair which is too fucking long, he’ll have to go to the barber but later, not now

his barber’s actually from Seville, he finds that incredibly funny and he sings her the aria every time, she laughs and threatens to screw up his sideburns but she’d never do that

his platter’s back on the table. He’ll have to glue it all back together. And call Hypatia Cade. He’s glad she’s still alive, the old lady, he’ll have to send her some flowers and swear by all that’s not wise—he never was wise, just a fighter, that’s all he ever claimed to be, someone who felt his way through to what was right and went together and what just simply didn’t, broken pieces all fitting together until something honest was learned.

It wasn’t always beautiful to everyone else and because it wasn’t beautiful maybe also it wasn’t true

lots of people thought Bones swore too much and his bedside manner was shit

other people thought Spock was cold but Jim knew better Spock was hot, hot as fire and warm, so lovely warm when he carried Jim back to the room and no matter if the crew stared it was kind of a lot to just not be there for a while

Jim didn’t care about other truths, they were loyal and Jim’s and he felt like he fit in between them and they slotted together, all jagged edges and prickles that slotted and stuck.

Spock’s _relief anguish anger_ leaked through and Bones practically trembled with it, his eyelashes fluttering into Jim’s neck where he’s tucked his head

Jim trembled too he had a lot of eating to do

right now he could handle a plum, a nice one so cold and so sweet

right now he’d just revel in this, enclosed in the parenthesis between the curves of Spock and of Bones, both holding on tightly and kissing and kissing and kissing until anything more Jim maybe knew felt like it leaked out his ears.

(kissing was fine wholly fine and if he was broken well they were broken together)

**Author's Note:**

> Here is a road map to the dense slush of references besides the cummings to start.
> 
> Keats' ["Ode on a Grecian Urn"](http://www.bartleby.com/101/625.html) ('Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'),
> 
> Page 213 of Sappho's "If Not, Winter", a collection of her poetry fragments
> 
> William Carlos Williams' "[This is Just to Say](http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15535)", the plums reference Jim makes at the end.


End file.
